The History of Human Mobility: The Story of the Inventions That Changed the Way We Move

00:00:10
Speaker 1: This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. And we tell stories about everything here on this show, including yours. Send them to OurAmericanStories.com. That’s OurAmericanStories.com. They’re some of our favorites. And now we get the special treat of hearing from the number one car collector in the world. Miles Collier is the founder of the Revs Institute, and today Miles brings us the story of human mobility.

00:00:38
Speaker 2: Here’s Miles with a history of personal mobility, starting with our legs and how we got out of Africa all the way up to the present auto-centric world. And it’s well known that the hypothesis that humankind arose in Africa appears to be the consensus at this particular point, and there was a diaspora of pre-humans and humans migrating out of there, and ultimately taking over the rest of the world, and then ultimately discovering the idea that you didn’t have…

00:01:21
Speaker 3: To do it all yourself.

00:01:23
Speaker 2: You could take advantage of the energy that was stored up in the bodies of domesticated animals, so you could start riding horses or using oxen to plow a field, and so on. And ultimately, after six thousand years of being paired with the horse, mankind discovered the internal combustion engine. The most surprising thing I discovered in my research was really the role of the horse in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century. What people don’t realize is we think of the Industrial Revolution, and we think of the advent of steam, and it’s often described as the Age of Steam, as well as possibly the Age of Electricity, because street trolley cars and electric light bulbs and things were all invented in the late nineteenth century. But in fact, if you look at the data, that period was really the Age of the Horse. The horse was omnipresent. The horse was critical for the working out of modern industrialized society. Now, why is that? Because if we want to think about steam and electricity as being wholesale forms of energy, there were no retail sources other than the horse. So a trainload of goods could arrive at the station of a city, and it came over hundreds of miles, and it was hundreds of tons of stuff. Then you had the problem of getting it from the depot to the doorstep, and that required individualized or retail transportation to do it. And there was no other retail transportation other than the horse. So, it’s counterintuitive. But as steam and electricity became more and more prevalent in the 1880s, 90s, 1900s, and 1910s, the population of horses living in the urban fabric increased concomitantly. Totally counterintuitive. The highest population of working horses in the United States was in 1910. There were 26 million working horses. And I’m not talking about my friend Flicka sticking his head over the fence that you…

00:03:53
Speaker 3: give two cubes of sugar to.

00:03:55
Speaker 2: I’m talking about horses that lived in high-rise stables in the mid-middle of the urban fabric and that were required to keep society going. And the impact that horses had on society was overwhelming, and because of their presence, viewed in general by society as incredibly damaging, destructive, environmentally destructive, dangerous to life and limb, bad for human morality, and so on and so on. In other words, the horse was as vilified in 1910 as the automobile is today. That I found absolutely fascinating. Now, let’s consider one of the most impactful aspects of the horse economy, and that was: if you have 26 million working horses, and boy, did they work!

00:04:49
Speaker 3: They were viewed by the public.

00:04:51
Speaker 2: in those days as biological machines, okay, which is just, we…

00:04:56
Speaker 3: Shudder to think of that.

00:04:57
Speaker 2: But they were not viewed as being sentient. They were not viewed as having feelings. They were literally biological machines. And each and every individual biological machine required five acres of fodder-producing agricultural land in order to be sustained for one year.

00:05:17
Speaker 3: Let’s do the math.

00:05:18
Speaker 2: 26 million times five is 130 million acres under cultivation to just support the biological machine, the horse, working in cities. What was the manifestation of that? Look at photographs of New England in the 1890s and 1900s, and you will see that the Green Hills of Vermont or the White Hills of New Hampshire haven’t got a tree on them anywhere. And if you go there today, you walk in the woods, and you can go way deep in the woods, and all of a sudden you’ll come across a stone wall. Well, those are the stone walls that bounded the fields that were necessary to support the horse. So one of the major impacts of the horse in the late nineteenth century was the denudation of forests throughout the world, or at least around the developed world. And with all of the negative impacts that has. Of courses obviously defecated and urinated all over the streets, and indeed they also had the bad taste to die when they were improperly treated or came to the end of their just totally exhausted. So it was a living in the city with horses cheeked by jowls meant that the infestation of rats, flies, sparrows, fleas, and all kinds of noxious vermin was ever-present.

00:06:50
Speaker 1: And you’re listening to Miles Collier with this fascinating explanation of life before the automobile and this idea that horses were machines. They were animals, but they were machines and viewed that way. 26 million working horses. Again, not those horses in the barn, those pretty horses in the barn—working horses. When we come back, more of this remarkable storytelling and automotive history and, well, life before the automobile. Miles Collier and his storytelling continues here on Our American Stories. Folks, if you love the great American stories we tell and love America like we do, we’re asking you to become a part of the Our American Stories family. If you agree that America is a good and great country, please make a donation. A monthly gift of $17.76 is fast becoming a favorite option for supporters. Go to OurAmericanStories.com now and go to the donate button and help us keep the great American stories coming. That’s OurAmericanStories.com.

00:08:16
Speaker 1: And we continue with Our American Stories and with Revs Institute founder Miles Collier on the story of human mobility. Let’s return to Miles on the Age of the Horse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and its effects, including from their poop.

00:08:30
Speaker 2: You know, one of the problems back in the day was, was tetanus, okay? Which comes to, you know, bacteria that would inhabit the gut of horses, and then there would be horseshoe nails that would come out, and people would get scratched or cut by something that was contaminated with tetanus bacteria. And the next thing, you know, lockjaw, as it was called in the day, was a real problem, but it was just a, you know, an urban sanitation problem. And the only thing that they had to clean up all those waste products was more horses pulling more wagons. Now, of course, you know, you hang bags behind the horse and all that kind of stuff, and it all helps a little bit. But if we think of it as the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’ equivalent to carbon monoxide and oxides of nitrogen, there’s nothing you can do about it. One early commentator remarked that I don’t know where he got these numbers, but something to the effect that 60 or 70 percent of all the dust that you inhale on urban streets is dried horse manure.

00:09:33
Speaker 3: Oh, thank you very much. That sounds pretty fun.

00:09:39
Speaker 2: So, you know, as I say, the automobile was seen as a major public health benefit. Tetanus was going to go away. You weren’t going to be breathing dried… and the horse manure. The car gave off virtually no noxious fumes whatsoever. It was silent; it didn’t start and startled and panic. It was just seen as a… In fact, it was seen as a major health benefit for the simple reason that you could take it and go out to the countryside and breathe all that wonderful ozone out there and enjoy the sunshine. And that’s so it makes sense that the horse was not looked at as a great thing. And as I say, the parallel to the automobile I find rather fascinating. And what we take from that is: if we are sufficiently dependent on a technology that it becomes overwhelming, and there are 1.4 billion automobiles operating in the world today. When that technology becomes overwhelming, of course it has negative influences. What the heck did you think was going to happen? So, yes, the automobile has all kinds of negatives. But, interestingly, in 1900 it was seen as a savior. It was seen as reducing urban noise. No more iron tires, clip-clop of iron horseshoes on cobblestrong streets, no groaning of non-ball-bearing axles on wagons, no cracking of whips, no screaming of teamsters. All was going to be silent with this new abidable servant that never started at an umbrella or at a blowing sheet of newspaper. And the problem was, back in those days, horses—they’re flight animals—and they will startle and they will run away. Can you imagine a horse dragging a carriage running away in full-blown panic through a highly crowded urban city during rush hour? How many people died?

00:11:40
Speaker 3: Lots?

00:11:42
Speaker 2: So the horse was a major, major problem, and the automobile was a major, major savior. And it’s ironic that roughly 100 years later, we now see the car as a major, major problem, and we’re anticipating something is going to come along and save us, like autonomous vehicles, at which point one can only laugh merrily and say, “Really?” So, are we going to see autonomous vehicles?

00:13:27
Speaker 3: That’s a doable problem.

00:13:29
Speaker 2: The issue where all of a sudden we’re in snow and rain and bad visibility and pedestrians and cars driven by maniacs and all these other kinds of things and high-density traffic, it becomes way more complicated, and so it’s easier just to finesse that the flexibility of the human driver handle it. There’s a big difference between how people estimate risk. It’s known that humankind are extraordinarily, really poor at estimating risk, and the issue here is that people estimate the risk that they are exposed to every day driving themselves in an automobile, you know, way, way underestimating the risk that’s inherent there, and taking nothing away from them as a driver. When they are not in charge of what’s going on, they overestimate the risk because, guess what, you’re not in control, and so, you know, whether it’s it’s true or not, you have a higher threshold to get over. And that’s why in my earlier comments I said, in order for something like autonomous cars to work, it has to be 99.9, you know, lots of digits on the right-hand side, so that in fact, a dangerous accident almost never happens because, you know, the the analogy for this is air transportation—only travel where the fatality rate…

00:15:04
Speaker 3: is astronomically small.

00:15:07
Speaker 2: I mean it’s—I don’t remember what is—but it is incrementally tiny compared to automobiles, and they’re moving, you know, 475 million people, and, you know, do the math.

00:15:21
Speaker 3: It’s point, you know, one percent or the.

00:15:25
Speaker 2: Other way to say it, you have a way higher chance of being struck dead by lightning walking out your door to the Uber that’s taking you to the airport. But people nevertheless that they have a fear of flying. Not too many people are scared to get into their, you know, wallpaper, woody town and country, and, you know, drive down to them, all right? And so that’s just part of the charm of trying to deal with human beings. Now, again, if you put them in certain controlled circumstances, I think they probably work, okay? You just don’t want to let them free in the wild, because just so many complicated things happen now. I will immediately be proven wrong when somebody announces an absolutely perfectly working autonomous vehicle in six months from there.

00:16:10
Speaker 3: But I think it’s a very difficult problem.

00:16:14
Speaker 2: Therefore, autonomy may be seen more where it has instantaneous economic benefit in a relatively constrained environment. So one of those places would be long-haul trucking. Right? So that you have a conventionally driven truck that goes to the the entrance to the Interstate in Fresno, California, and it’s got a load of strawberries on board, and at that point the driver gets off, and it hits the autonomous button, and the autonomous truck then runs from Fresno straight to New York City. And when it gets off the Interstate in New Jersey at a big parking lot, another driver jumps in and he drives that thing down and through the city, and so on, so, and then those kinds of things would result in an enormous, uh, economic benefit.

00:17:00
Speaker 3: Kinstre’s Union won’t like it. Look, I’m just blowing smoke here.

00:17:06
Speaker 1: And we’ve been listening to Miles Collier telling the story of human mobility and folks who were waiting and watching in 1910, ’20, and ’30 as Henry Ford was bringing down the cost of cars and making them ubiquitous. Only very wealthy people had the access or means to have a car, and Ford—well, he transformed the world. When we come back, more of Miles Collier telling the story of human mobility here on Our American Stories, and we continue with Our American Stories and with Revs Institute founder Miles Collier on the story of human mobility. Let’s return to Miles.

00:18:24
Speaker 2: The thing we do when we try and prognosticate technology is we have a tendency both to overestimate and underestimate simultaneously. And what do I mean by that? Well, if we go back to sort of the Popular Mechanics of the 1950s, there was a magazine at the time for sort of home shop and the technology of the future kind of thing. There was an article every other issue about flying cars. Simultaneously, if we remember the Sunday papers, we had Dick Tracy with his wrist radio, and we now moved to the real-life 2021. No one’s seen a flying car yet, and we don’t anticipate any in the near future. And the risk radio is such a ridiculously primitive and silly, trivial thing compared to what our so-called risk radios—to wit, the iPad—can do today. So we’ve massively overestimated the high-profile, flashy technology of flying cars and massively underestimated the mundane technology of something like the phone. And indeed, an early commentator in the turn of the century—the turn of the nineteenth of the twentieth century—comments on the telephone and the autobile by saying something like, “The autobile has had more immediate influence on our society, but I expect that over time the telephone will prove to be the greater change agent.” I was written in like 1902 or 1903.

00:20:01
Speaker 3: Well, I was.

00:20:02
Speaker 2: You took him 100 years to be right. But wowly, he’s right now! I find that an absolutely amazing comment. It’ll be interesting to see what does happen. But the thing about prognosticating the future, especially in things like this, is you can be right on connecting all the intellectual dots and still be wildly wrong.

00:20:24
Speaker 3: What do I mean by that?

00:20:25
Speaker 2: So there’s a quotation in one of the early car magazines from 1902 that talks about the coming nirvana with the automobile and how it’s going to reduce urban congestion, and the urban congestion during the time of the horse was diabolical. So the urban congestion would be reduced because, as the writer says, there would be the space taken up by the horse, and we would therefore immediately drop our density by 50 percent and there…

00:21:00
Speaker 3: would be freer motion. Well, how did that work out?

00:21:00
Speaker 2: The argument that the autonomous car folks are basically making at this point is, do you realize that your automobile sits for 94 percent of its time doing nothing, taking up space? With the autonomous car in the shared economy, we can reduce the car population from down to 20 percent of what it is today, or whatever the number is. And that’s exactly as true as the idea that with the advent of the automobile over the horse, that traffic population would drop by 50 percent. No, because people will come up with new ways to use the artifact, new ways that…